Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten


Book Description

Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of Einstürzende Neubauten's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. The group have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.




Designing Media


Book Description

"Mainstream media, often known simply as MSM, have not yet disappeared in a digital takeover of the media landscape. But the long-dominant MSM--television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and books--have had to respond to emergent digital media. Newspapers have interactive Web sites; television broadcasts over the Internet; books are published in both electronic and print editions. In Designing Media, design guru Bill Moggridge examines connections and conflicts between old and new media, describing how the MSM have changed and how new patterns of media consumption are emerging. The book features interviews with thirty-seven significant figures in both traditional and new forms of mass communication; interviewees range from the publisher of the New York Times to the founder of Twitter. We learn about innovations in media that rely on contributions from a crowd (or a community), as told by Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales and Craigslist's Craig Newmark; how the band OK Go built a following using YouTube; how real-time connections between dispatchers and couriers inspired Twitter; how a BusinessWeek blog became a quarterly printed supplement to the magazine; and how e-readers have evolved from Rocket eBook to QUE. Ira Glass compares the intimacy of radio to that of the Internet; the producer of PBS's Frontline supports the program's investigative journalism by putting documentation of its findings online; and the developers of Google's Trendalyzer software describe its beginnings as animations that accompanied lectures about social and economic development in rural Africa"--Provider website.




Headcleaner


Book Description

This is the compilation of all the lyrics ever used in Einsturzende Neubauten songs written by their front man Blixa Bargeld. It features commentary and remarks by Maria Zinfert, Blixa Bargeld a.o. on the origin and intention of the lyrics in E.N. songs. All texts appear in German and English.




Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music


Book Description

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on Einstürzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. Einstürzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.




Berlin Calling


Book Description

An exhilarating journey through the subcultures, occupied squats, and late-night scenes in the anarchic first few years of Berlin after the fall of the wall Berlin Calling is a gripping account of the 1989 "peaceful revolution" in East Germany that upended communism and the tumultuous years of artistic ferment, political improvisation, and pirate utopias that followed. It’s the story of a newly undivided Berlin when protest and punk rock, bohemia and direct democracy, techno and free theater were the order of the day. In a story stocked with fascinating characters from Berlin’s highly politicized undergrounds—including playwright Heiner Müller, cult figure Blixa Bargeld of the industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, the internationally known French Wall artist Thierry Noir, the American multimedia artist Danielle de Picciotto (founder of Love Parade), and David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust incarnation—Hockenos argues that the DIY energy and raw urban vibe of the early 1990s shaped the new Berlin and still pulses through the city today. Just as Mike Davis captured Los Angeles in his City of Quartz, Berlin Calling is a unique account of how Berlin became hip, and of why it continues to attract creative types from the world over.




Nick Cave's Bar


Book Description

A mission to find a mythological watering hole... In June 1999, Aug Stone and his best friend flew to Germany to find the bar they had heard Nick Cave owned in Berlin. They assumed they would get off the plane, ask 'which way to Nick Cave's bar?', and then spend the rest of their time living it up amidst the wild world of its confines. Instead what followed were nine days of confusion, thwarted plans, and perpetual drunken misery. To this day, they're not sure Nick Cave ever owned a bar in Berlin. Aug Stone is a writer, comedian, & musician. Stone is the author of the comedy novel Off-License To Kill, and his journalism has appeared in The Quietus, The Comics Journal, Under The Radar, and many other sites and magazines. He performs comedy as Young Southpaw, bringing his surreal stories to the world via The Young Southpaw Part Of An Hour podcast and 'blends the arts with the absurd' on his interview show Etcetera ETC With Young Southpaw.




A Song for Europe


Book Description

The world's largest and longest-running song competition, the Eurovision Song Contest is a significant and extremely popular media event throughout the continent and abroad. Here, an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, explore how the contest sheds light on issues of European politics, national and European identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the aesthetics of camp. Eurovision is sometimes regarded as a low-brow camp spectacle of little aesthetic or intellectual value. The essays in this collection often contradict this assumption, demonstrating that the contest has actually been a significant force and forecaster for social, cultural and political transformations in postwar Europe.




Rip It Up and Start Again


Book Description

A landmark history of post-punk, the basis of the documentary film directed by Nikolaos Katranis Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.




The Sick Bag Song


Book Description

The Sick Bag Song chronicles Cave’s 22-city journey around North America in 2014. Racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments – the people, the books and the music – that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his sick bag. The book began its life scribbled onto airline sick bags and later evolves into a restless contemporary epic, exploring love, loss, inspiration and memory.




Nonbinary


Book Description

A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge—now in paperback In this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of “industrial music,” founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck—stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis’s final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists. Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis’s life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II’s fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life. In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.